“If you followed the advice I just gave your head office might view you as a weak manager. If, when they asked you how things were going, you said that you were still ‘working things out’ they might view you that way but actually you would just be doing your job properly because once it’s agreed it will be fully implemented. But it won’t be even partly implemented until it is fully agreed. (CB: So it is important for the head office to have some kind of understanding of the particulars of the Japanese environment?) Yes, but they don’t, it’s just not the nature of the beast. If you look at the big international companies that have prospered in Japan you will see that they have all had very long periods where they were investing and not taking any money out of the market at all….for 20, 30 years some of them. But now they are established and are making money. Anybody who is coming into the market thinking that they are going to make a quick profit in two years is just delusional. I mean, we were profitable in our first year when I first moved here but that is not usual.”
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This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail
“In Japan, the most successful managers are people that care about people. I think that you can make a lot of mistakes (and get away with it) if people think that you are doing it for the right reasons. You can create a lot of change and discomfort if people understand that your motivations are not manipulative or self-serving – that it’s really for the good of the organization or the good of the individual concerned.
Also, particularly in Japan, people won’t push back very much. They won’t challenge a lot so you have to be careful that you don’t railroad people and force people along a path that they haven’t bought into. Go more slowly than you otherwise would or you’ll miss the signs that they aren’t on board and get the passive aggression at the end.”
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This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail
“I suppose that I would let them know that people management is quite a big part of the job here. I wouldn’t talk about individuals at that point because they need to form their own opinions on the team – who’s good and who isn’t. But the team here has worked together for a long time – staff turnover is very low, so whoever comes into the job will find that you don’t get shouting matches in the office or anything like that. I suppose that someone who doesn’t know Japan needs to understand that that doesn’t mean that everything is completely cake and roses and that there are tensions between certain people, or historic questions about who is supposed to do which job. You won’t pick these things up if you stand here and look around the room. You won’t really spot it at first, but then 3 months in you’ll get someone coming and knocking on your door saying “did you know that this person did this?” That’s one thing that I would highlight, that HR and people management is probably going to take up a lot of time.”
“Certainly in my career history this has been the job where people management has been the most challenging. Part of the reason is that it’s the biggest team I’ve ever had. When I was here last time it was a big team and it was challenging then, but when I’ve not been in Japan I’ve only ever had one or two people reporting to me. But beyond that, one thing is that turnover is quicker in other countries so if two people don’t get along you can grin and bear it for a year if things really can’t be resolved and typically after a year or two years in my home country someone will be promoted or change jobs or whatever. So the longevity of service here makes it more challenging - put you and me in the same room for 18 years we’d, y’know… And that’s what these guys have had. They’re like a family, they know each other very well but at the same time there are embedded issues because of the length of time they’ve spent together. That’s one. And I supposed in Europe people are more vocal. Well, they’re not more vocal but they are more direct. If they have an issue with someone then they are more likely to discuss it directly with that person whereas here they are more likely to shy away from raising it directly but they will talk to their own boss about it, and gossip in the coffee room about it – that kind of stuff. Sometimes you have to deliberately bring the issues to light whereas in my home country it would naturally come to light. We are basically a happy team though, I just mention it since you are asking about differences.”
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This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail
“Creating an innovative environment of change in Japan is a tricky cross-cultural thing. You have a foreign manager driving change and potentially creating discord. If you do it well maybe you don’t have to be disliked though, as long as everyone understands what you are trying to do. That comes down to good communication.”
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This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail
“If you look at change models, you know on average, about 2% of the population enjoys change, but another 16% will go along with it because they can see that it’s required. Another 30% will go along with it if the key opinion leaders do, because they are just kind of followers and another 30% will go along with it because it’s reached critical mass and they have no choice. But you will always have a 10-15% group at the bottom that in a Western company would quit, but in Japan they don’t – they’ll just be disgruntled and passive aggressive……… These people are the greatest inhibitors to creativity and innovation; passive-aggressive people who actually work as a counter against innovation.”
“In Japan there is never really any overt opposition to anything because harmony is the goal but there is what we call passive aggression, where people will agree to your face and go ahead and undermine through the nemawashi – create the allies and divide the team. That’s really inhibiting to the creation of high performance teams in Japan and a lot of foreigners don’t even know that it’s going on.”
“In the West those people will be vocal, and they’ll put out the word and they’ll leave. They’ll do a mid-career shift. Japanese won’t do that. They’ll stick around and they’ll stay for 20 more years – literally. They’ll even take a pay cut. You can’t fire them. They’ll let you demote them, cut their pay and shove them in a back room. They’ll take whatever dusty old job you have and they’ll just wait for their pension. It’s a different orientation. They’re in the job for security, not money or personal ambition. They derive their status from their business card. They work for the company.”
****************************************************
This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail
